Weaknees hard drive upgrade kit fiasco. (Long)

On 2006-04-17, Stephen Harris wrote:
Bill Kearney wrote:


You're blaming TiVo when Linksys goes out of their way to break things?
Linksys changes out the hardware of the NIC with a totally different
chip, while leaving the same packaging and model # attached all over.

Linksys is not the only vendor to do this, Netgear has done it as well.

The state of linux USB ethernet is pretty lame. There aren't many reliable

This isn't even limited to USB NICs; general purpose PCI ethernet cards
(yes, Linksys is also doing it here) can be totally rebuilt between
"revisions" of the card, and so require different drivers. Essentially
they are different cards, but they're marketted under the same name.

It's very unusual that a wired ethernet chipset isn't supported
in Linux. This is kind of the native environment for Linux and Unix in
general. Ethernet support was very good even in the earliest distros back
when everyone else was still on dialups. It was kind of annoying actually.
The sophistication of the dialup tools then was rather lacking.

Some of the earliest ethernet drivers in Linux were developed
by the same people that made the first Linux supercomputing clusters at NASA.


When buying an ethernet card for a general purpose linux machine you
sometimes have to be aware of revision of the card, to ensure the right
drivers are loaded (or even if drivers exist at all).

This **** is really annoying.


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JEDIDIAH wrote:
On 2006-04-17, Stephen Harris wrote:
This isn't even limited to USB NICs; general purpose PCI ethernet cards
(yes, Linksys is also doing it here) can be totally rebuilt between
"revisions" of the card, and so require different drivers. Essentially
they are different cards, but they're marketted under the same name.

It's very unusual that a wired ethernet chipset isn't supported
in Linux. This is kind of the native environment for Linux and Unix in
general. Ethernet support was very good even in the earliest distros back

No, no it wasn't. There were a number of drivers available, but there
were lots of cards that just would not work. You had to be damned
careful of what card you got. Hell, I had the same problem
(with Linksys) in 2002 :-(

when everyone else was still on dialups. It was kind of annoying actually.
The sophistication of the dialup tools then was rather lacking.

It didn't have a pretty GUI, but ppp worked just fine if you could edit
a file or two.

Some of the earliest ethernet drivers in Linux were developed
by the same people that made the first Linux supercomputing clusters at NASA.

One man wrote a lot of the original drivers; Donald Becker. He also created
the beowulf clusters for NASA.

--
Stephen Harris

The truth is the truth, and opinion just opinion. But what is what?
My employer pays to ignore my opinions; you get to do it for free.

PCI and Cardbus slots are also an option. Either one of those would
be remarkably better than USB.

Eh, for the bandwidth needed, it wouldn't be very cost-effective(from a
manufacturing standpoint) to add PCI or Cardbus (PCMCIA) slots. USB 2.0 has
plenty of bandwidth for 10/100 Ethernet provided decent drivers are
available.

Wifi is a mess even under ideal conditions.

Amen to that.

On 2006-04-18, Stephen Harris wrote:
JEDIDIAH wrote:
On 2006-04-17, Stephen Harris wrote:
This isn't even limited to USB NICs; general purpose PCI ethernet cards
(yes, Linksys is also doing it here) can be totally rebuilt between
"revisions" of the card, and so require different drivers. Essentially
they are different cards, but they're marketted under the same name.

It's very unusual that a wired ethernet chipset isn't supported
in Linux. This is kind of the native environment for Linux and Unix in
general. Ethernet support was very good even in the earliest distros back

No, no it wasn't. There were a number of drivers available, but there

As compared to what?

Video cards?
Audio cards?
Winmodems?
The current mess with wifi?

were lots of cards that just would not work. You had to be damned
careful of what card you got. Hell, I had the same problem
(with Linksys) in 2002 :-(

In over 10 years of using Linux, NICs are absolutely the last
thing I've ever had to worry about in terms of driver support.

[deletia]

--
vi isn't easy to use. |||
/ | \
vi is easy to REPLACE.

On Tue, 18 Apr 2006 01:24:01 GMT, (GMAN) wrote:

In article , "Randy S." wrote:
Gad Zoox wrote:
On 17 Apr 2006 09:41:24 -0700, wrote:


Hi, I'm curious about this. Will not having version 7.2.2 prevent
someone from upgrading from scratch from a new clean, unformatted IDE
drive, or does this apply only to upgrade drives that have already been
specially pre configured?


I'll let you know after next Saturday. I'm going to have a v7.2.2
"compatible" USB adapter by then and I'm going to try and use the
mfstools to add the second drive. If that doesn't work, then I'm going
to InstantCake the drives.

Dennis

From what it sounds like it even a scratch install would still be
blocked as it seems the "holding tank" list is kept server side, and not
based on client side detection. That's just a educated guess though.

Randy S.
I thnk he just wants to get the second drive installed, upgraded OS be damned.

Exactly!

From what it sounds like it even a scratch install would still be
blocked as it seems the "holding tank" list is kept server side, and not
based on client side detection. That's just a educated guess though.

Randy S.

I thnk he just wants to get the second drive installed, upgraded OS be damned.


Exactly!

Sure, but I see his problem, and what I said still holds. He wants to
use the Weaknees software to expand his drive. But he can't do it with
software version 7.2 as the weaknees software won't work with that. So
he needs to upgrade to 7.2.2 in order to be able to expand the drive.
But Tivo has the update for him on hold because it detected an
unsupported USB NIC.

Since Tivo is keeping track of the units on hold serverside (I believe
from the info talked about so far), he won't get the upgrade until Tivo
removes his unit from that list, even *if* he does a clean install w/ a
new image.

So he's in a catch-22, which I can sympathize with. The only out I can
see is to either install an *older* Tivo OS version, expand the disk w/
the weaknees disk, *then* let it upgrade; or wait for Tivo's next update.

Randy S.

On 2006-04-19, Randy S. wrote:
From what it sounds like it even a scratch install would still be
blocked as it seems the "holding tank" list is kept server side, and not
based on client side detection. That's just a educated guess though.

I thnk he just wants to get the second drive installed, upgraded OS be damned.

Exactly!

Sure, but I see his problem, and what I said still holds. He wants to
use the Weaknees software to expand his drive. But he can't do it with
software version 7.2 as the weaknees software won't work with that. So
he needs to upgrade to 7.2.2 in order to be able to expand the drive.
But Tivo has the update for him on hold because it detected an
unsupported USB NIC.

Since Tivo is keeping track of the units on hold serverside (I believe
from the info talked about so far), he won't get the upgrade until Tivo
removes his unit from that list, even *if* he does a clean install w/ a
new image.

So he's in a catch-22, which I can sympathize with. The only out I can
see is to either install an *older* Tivo OS version, expand the disk w/
the weaknees disk, *then* let it upgrade; or wait for Tivo's next update.

I haven't been following this thread much but can't he just follow the
Hinsdale FAQ and do it without the help of weaknees?

--
This is my .sig

On Mon, 17 Apr 2006 16:59:35 -0400, Gad Zoox
wrote:

On 17 Apr 2006 09:41:24 -0700, wrote:

Hi, I'm curious about this. Will not having version 7.2.2 prevent
someone from upgrading from scratch from a new clean, unformatted IDE
drive, or does this apply only to upgrade drives that have already been
specially pre configured?

I'll let you know after next Saturday. I'm going to have a v7.2.2
"compatible" USB adapter by then and I'm going to try and use the
mfstools to add the second drive. If that doesn't work, then I'm going
to InstantCake the drives.

Dennis


Well, it's Saturday morning and I've got good news. I downloaded the
PTVUpgrade LBA48 free CD and used the msfadd command and now my Tivo
is showing 332 hours capacity. This was with Tivo v7.2.1 using the
Weaknees kit with mfstools. I still have all my programs, Season
Passes, etc.

All is good.

Dennis

Thanks Dennis for passing along that info. I'll be doing the same thing
once my 90 warrantees expire.